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Mal Reynolds: If I ever kill you, you'll be awake. You'll be facing
me, and you'll be armed.Firefly

Eric Holder and his boss do not share this philosophy. They reserve
the right to assassinate anyone anywhere as part of the "war on
terror."

Among other problems is that they've defined most of the readership of
TLE as potential terrorists.

To be honest I do not think they'll bother with me or most of you
reading this. However, I also am not happy about being under the power
of people to whom dissent and terrorism and war are all one thing.

I could be mistaken,but it is not the Attorney General's job to
discuss how his boss (The President) conducts a war. How the
President prosecutes a war is for the Secretary of Defense to comment
upon. This makes Mr. Holder's recent comments on whether or not it is
proper for President Obama to execute American citizens without a fair
trial as part of the "War on Terror" totally inappropriate. He should
have referred it to Leon Panetta, our secretary of war.

The correct answer is that it is almost never proper, morally or
legally, to execute people without giving them their day in court. It
is legal to kill enemy soldiers while carry out a war (whether or not
it is moral you may discuss among yourself another time) however this
is not extrajudicial execution. Yet this is the exact power Mr. Holder
claims for the President. Not the duty to kill enemy soldiers, but to
execute persons without trial.

So I believe in the Constitution and the right to bear arms. I
consider abortion morally objectionable (though I admit there is no
Constitutionally acceptable way to act to prevent it.). I understand
that makes me a potential terrorist. So according to John McCain this
means I can be locked up indefinitely, and according to Eric Holder I
can be bombed with drones without a trial. As I've said before, I'm
not worth the effort, so I'm not particularly worried either will
happen. Still that's what those spavined culls claim.

And every Republican Candidate for President except Ron Paul agrees
with them.

"...it is not the Attorney General's job to discuss how his boss (the
President ) conducts a war...."

Does a state of war exist?

What we have in the present yet-another-friggin'-Progressive "moral
equivalent of war" isn't really a war at all, in the
sense of condition of formal conflict among sovereign polities. Even
the campaigns conducted by the governments of the European colonies
and the American states against the various indigenous tribes and
confederations on this continent from the earliest years of settlement
could reasonably be called "wars."

But a "war" upon something so inchoate as "terror"? Impossible. Too
much like all the Progressive bullshit that's been foisted upon us
since the earliest days of the 20th Century, ever since those meddling
scum saw how wonderfully the declaration of war against the Central
Powers enabled the suppression of dissent and the engagement of
patriotic "we're all in his together" fervor back in 1917.

Look up the expression "the moral equivalent of war" in order to get
an idea of how the government-gone-juramentado types treasure
the understanding that "war is the health of the state."

Now, were there to be declared a war against Islamic
terrorwhich amounts to war against the ummah itself (which
is how the Islamic whackjobs have always viewed the very existence of
us un-dhimmi'd infidels)to include blowing that hunk of
meteoric rock in downtown Mecca back up into extraterrestrial space,
followed by subjecting all those of the Muslim faith surviving to the
same treatment that Muslim polities have subjected the followers of
Zorastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Ba'hai....

That, of course, isn't libertarian in any sense. But it
is warfare as one correctly defines the practice.

There's much truth in your observation about what is (and is not) the
proper job of the U.S. Attorney General. He isand has always beennothing
more than the President's attack dog, wonderfully
epitomized by Saint Woodrow Wilson's Alexander Michell Palmer, about
whom none of those reading here learned anything in any government
school anywhere in these United States, except to the extent you've
caught references to the expression "Palmer Raids" in the writings of
aggrieved elderly parlor pinkos.

But insofar as we're discussing a "war" in consideration of the
so-called "war on terror," you're acidically way off-base. Ain't no
such thing happening, and therefore to the extent that we can speak
(without succumbing to hysterical laughter) about which of Barry
Soebarkah's co-conspirators on the federal payroll have "legitimacy"
in running this yet-another-friggin'-Progressive spurious "war," the
U.S. Attorney General is precisely as appropriate as is his
Sotocapo of Aggression, Leon Panetta.

Extending into trivia, the extent to which it is "...proper, morally
[and] legally, to execute people without giving them their day in
court..." in a condition of war are dictated under practices almost
universally recognized among the nations participant in modern
diplomatic relations, and they're a helluva lot broader than you seem
to appreciate, up to and including situations in which taking
prisoners can be construed even potentially to imperil the
fulfillment of an individual combatant or commander's mission.

This is why it's long been recognized as wonderfully stupid for a
soldier to surrender to an enemy armored unit. Tank-heavy troops
simply don't have the manpower to detach prisoner-chasers, and the
practices of either taking no prisoners or machine-gunning them en
masse (Malmedy-style) are considered regrettable necessities in
the maintenance of operational tempo.